Amazon Cash Pilot Cuts Hunger and Protects Forest

Amazon Cash Pilot results published this month suggest that a modest, no-strings payment can do two jobs at once: ease hunger in Indigenous communities and strengthen care for the rainforest around them. The two-year pilot in Peru gave regular cash transfers to participants across three communities, with no requirement to plant a tree, skip a burn or spend the money in any particular way.

The pilot was run by the climate charity Cool Earth and analysed by researchers at the University of Bath, according to reporting on the study. It covered participants from Asháninka and Yanesha communities in the central Peruvian Amazon, and it was designed with local women's groups. Each adult received six transfers, one every four months, worth just over a thousand soles apiece, an amount described as roughly two pounds a day.

Alongside the money came an optional training programme, called Cash Plus, covering money management, Indigenous rights, governance, conservation and climate change. Attendance was voluntary, yet most people took part, and community coordinators visited monthly. That combination matters for interpreting the results: the pilot tested cash plus support and organisation, not cash dropped in isolation.

The headline change was in food security. The share of households unable to afford nutritious food fell from almost three-quarters at the start to roughly a quarter by the end. Fewer families had to leave home to find casual work elsewhere, with the share forced to migrate for outside labour dropping from more than two-fifths to under a fifth. When people can stay, they can look after land, water and neighbours instead of chasing short-term work far away.

What changed on the land

Nearly nine in ten participants reported adopting practices that help the environment, including joining collective replanting efforts, restoring water sources and reducing forest burning. Some planted native trees, others helped protect springs, and many shifted away from short-term survival work such as logging toward more sustainable farming. Researchers linked that shift directly to reduced pressure on remaining forest, since families relied less on clearing new ground to make ends meet.

Household finances moved in the same direction. The Amazon Cash Pilot also lifted savings, with the share of households able to save rising from about half to seven in ten, and wellbeing scores more than doubled over the course of the pilot. A large majority of participants said they had helped fund a family member's education with the extra income. Those are human gains first, and conservation gains second, which is exactly the order the researchers say matters: security first, stewardship follows.

The comparison with traditional conservation payments is instructive. Many forest programmes pay only when a condition is met, or fund a single project, which can leave families choosing between the payment and their next meal. Here the payment came first and the environmental action followed voluntarily, chosen by communities rather than imposed on them. Co-author Nick Langridge put it plainly, saying that when communities have greater security and autonomy, they are better able to protect the ecosystems they depend on.

Why the results need care

There are honest limits, and the researchers do not hide them. The pilot was small, it had no comparison group, and it did not measure the forest directly, so it cannot prove that tree cover itself improved. Other academics warn that cash transfers can drive deforestation if they fund farm expansion or vehicles, a risk any larger programme would have to watch closely. The study is best read as early evidence for an idea its authors call conservation basic income, not as a finished verdict.

Still, the timing gives the findings weight. Indigenous stewardship already protects vast areas of carbon-storing forest, yet the communities doing that work often face the sharpest food and income pressures. A model that eases those pressures without adding new conditions could, if scaled carefully, reach places where conventional aid struggles. Wider research, with comparison communities and direct forest measurement, is the obvious next step.

For readers far from the Amazon, the lesson travels. Climate policy often treats people and nature as competing claims on the same budget. This pilot suggests they can move together, when the people closest to the forest are given room to plan, save and stay. That is a hopeful note, but also a testable one, and the next trials will show whether it holds at larger scale.

Related: how flood rebuilding could raise emissions as seas rise and how Europe doubled climate adaptation funding for hotter years.